Riff lets you and your Facebook friends have a conversation through video, and it's the best attempt at collaborative video we've yet seen.

The idea of a mobile app that lets different people contribute clips to a single project has been percolating for a long time. We've looked at several, like MixBit and Vyclone, but none of them impressed us and most didn't even work as advertised. Enter Riff (free), a collaborative video app from Facebook that leverages the enormous popularity of the big blue social network to let you and your friends cut clips into video conversations. This app is simple and sensible, but despite Facebook's blessing, it still feels like a bit of a long shot.

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Setup Unsurprisingly, you must log in with Facebook, but that's pretty much the extent of Riff's setup process. As soon as you sign in, you're taken straight into the app and can start posting videos immediately. During testing, we used a Nexus 5 and also ran Riff for iPhone on an iPhone 5. The Nexus is not famed for its quality camera, which we definitely noticed this in our testing. Your mileage may vary depending on the camera feature of the handset of your choice.

Start Riffing Despite being spawned by Facebook, Riff sports none of the company's typical blue-and-white trappings. A day-glo blue bar across the top frames large, auto-playing previews of Riff videos. Riffs from your friends appear at the top of the screen, followed by curated Featured Riffs. Big blue Material Design-style buttons on each Riff invite you to contribute your own clips. It's a slick interface, and it puts all the necessary tools (and stats, like number of clips in a riff) within easy reach. But we do wish we could pause or at least mute the videos.

What sets Riff apart from video apps like Vine or Instagram is that Riffs aren't finished when you post them. Instead they are ongoing conversations between the video's originator and all of their Facebook friends. After you post a Riff, all your Riff-using Facebook friends will see it in the app and be able to add their own videos to your Riff. If the folks at Riff decide your video is popular and exciting enough to be Featured, everyone using the app will be able to see it. Riff is not billed as a private service, and a clear warning states as much when you first start shooting.

While testing Riff at PCMag, Michael and Max shot videos of their lunches back and forth from across the neighborhood. We found that videos uploaded quickly, and that it was easy to keep a moving-picture conversation going.

Riff uses your Facebook friends as a trusted network, and prevents strangers from adding videos to your Riff. But as most of us know, not all of us are really friendly with all our Facebook friends. That racist uncle of yours could easily add something embarrassing to your Riff about kittens. Thankfully, the overflow menu pulls up a nicely designed menu for deleting or reporting individual clips in a given Riff. You can use that reporting tool (cleverly designed to look like a policeman's whistle) on any Riff video clip you think offensive.

Unfortunately, you cannot lock a Riff in order to prevent others from adding additional clips. Like films, Riffs are never complete—only abandoned (or deleted).

In the top right corner, a simple, clear "Start new video" bar makes it purpose evident. First, you'll be shown a group of text tags (such as Bro, #myfood, or pets) that you can use to describe your Riff, or you can use a text-entry box to enter a custom topic for your video compilation. You then get a 3-second countdown before your phone starts recording. Note that Riff defaults to the front-facing "selfie" camera, but you can flip it during the countdown. We prefer how other video apps let us toggle back and forth at will. We also noticed a slight, but annoying, delay between when the app said it was recording and when recording actually began.

Video clips can be up to 20 seconds in length (more generous than Vine's 6 seconds or Instagram's 15 seconds), and must be at minimum 3 seconds long. Hit the red X button to restart if something wasn't right.

Once you're finished, you can simultaneously share your Riff to your Facebook timeline, where it has a large square, Vine-like appearance. Your viewers can tap an HD button, full-screen the video, or even download it. Notably, while Riffs appear as Flash objects on desktop computers, they play just fine in the Facebook iPhone app, which lacks Flash.

Sounds fun right? Normally, this would be the part of the review where we embed the fruits of our labor for you to see, but that's not an option with Riff. You can share a Riff video to any app that accepts video—Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, and so on. This merely sends viewers a link to a Web-based player which, while pleasantly large, offers few options—you can't even pause or mute. You can, however, see how many video clips the Riff includes and how many times it's been viewed (something that took Vine about a year to include).

Riff OnWith Riff, Facebook has successfully solved the two problems that held back collaborative video. First, it created a slick, functional app (though Max wishes it was as clean as Facebook Messenger, and a little less like the awful Slingshot). Second, the close integration with Facebook means that Riff doesn't have to build its own community from scratch. In our testing, we had no trouble finding each other's Riffs and tacking on our own (mildly) amusing addendums.

But while Riff is surprisingly fun and superlatively simple, its launch might be ill-timed. This app dropped right as the tech world was shifting from Meerkat to Twitter's Periscope—two apps devoted to streaming live video from mobile devices. In the week since Riff's launch, our feeds have been silent, and even the featured videos haven't updated, suggesting that it hasn't caught on. It's possible that the support of Facebook will see Riff through, and give it a chance to shine later on (as Vine did) but we wonder if the best attempt so far at collaborative video will wither in the face of livestreaming.

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About the Author

Max Eddy is a Software Analyst, taking a critical eye to Android apps and security services. He's also PCMag's foremost authority on weather stations and digital scrapbooking software. When not polishing his tinfoil hat or plumbing the depths of the Dark Web, he can be found working to discern the 100 Best Android Apps.
Prior to PCMag, Max wrote... See Full Bio

Michael Muchmore is PC Magazine's lead analyst for software and web applications. A native New Yorker, he has at various times headed up PC Magazine's coverage of Web development, enterprise software, and display technologies. Michael cowrote one of the first overviews of web services for a general audience. Before that he worked on PC Magazine's S... See Full Bio

Riff (for Android)

Riff (for Android)

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